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ST. LOUIS — Two men and two women were shot dead this afternoon in a murder-suicide at a health care business in St. Louis, a police source said.

The male shooter is among the four dead, police say. Officers recovered a semiautomatic handgun from the crime scene.

St. Louis Police Capt. Michael Sack said the dead were in their early 40s to mid-50s.

The shots were fired about 1:40 p.m. at the business, police say. Sack said surveillance video showed the shooter opened fire after having a brief argument with people inside the business.

“We don’t know if this is a prior thing that carried over,” Sack said.

Michael Graff, who has a law office in the same building, said the health care business was owned and staffed by Somalian immigrants. He said he had heard heated arguing there on past occasions. Graff was not in the building Thursday when the shooting occurred.

Sack said the shooter appeared to be an employee or owner of the health care business, and that the victims were employees. No one else was injured.

The top leaders of one of Chicago’s most violent street gangs have been charged in a sweeping racketeering case that alleges they controlled their West Side drug empire through pattern of intimidation, kidnappings, shootings and murder dating back to the mid-1990s, according to an affidavit unsealed today in Cook County Criminal Court.

Before sunrise today, police armed with "no knock" search warrants fanned out across the Chicago area surprising dozens of leaders of the Black Souls, including Cornel Dawson, known as the gang’s chief, and Teron Odum, described as Dawson’s second-in-command. Also arrested were a number of “top runners” and “supervisors” who authorities say control the gang’s street operations.

The 78-page affidavit alleges the Black Souls ran an $11 million-a-year drug operation and protected the enterprise with violence that included at least seven murders from 1994 to 2012. In all, 23 members of the gang have been charged with racketeering conspiracy, while 18 more face state drug or weapons charges, authorities said.

South Boston mob boss James J. “Whitey” Bulger was at the center of “murder and mayhem” for nearly three decades, killing 19 people in the 1970s and 1980s, extorting millions from drug dealers and other criminals, and corrupting police and FBI agents, prosecutors said today as the gangster’s trial got under way 18 years after his indictment.

“It’s a case about organized crime, public corruption and all sorts of illegal activities,” prosecutor Brian T. Kelly said. “At the center of all this murder and mayhem is one man — the defendant in this case, James Bulger.”

The government plans to show the jury a 700-page file they say shows Bulger, while committing a long list of crimes, was working as an FBI informant, providing information on the New England Mob — his gang’s main rivals — and corrupting FBI agents who ignored his crimes.

But defense attorney J.W. Carney disputed that contention, saying Bulger’s heritage prevented him from cozying up with the FBI.

“No 1, James Bulger is of Irish descent,” Carney said. “And the worst thing an Irish person could consider doing is becoming an informant.”

The New Jersey police officer who allegedly shot a man to death in an act of road rage has been charged with second degree murder and manslaughter by Maryland authorities.

Joseph Walker, an officer in the Hudson County, N.J., prosecutor’s office is being held on a $1 million bond, according to Maryland State Police, for allegedly shooting Joseph Harvey, Jr. on an on-ramp to Route 3, twenty miles south of Baltimore on Saturday.

The motive for the altercation remains unknown. Walker, an off-duty officer, was in a minivan with his wife and three children, according to Maryland State Police spokeswoman Elena Russo. The two vehicles came to a stop on the on-ramp and Harvey allegedly exited his vehicle and walked toward Walker before being shot.

(SANTA MONICA, Calif.) — A gunman with an assault-style rifle killed at least six people in Santa Monica on Friday before police shot him to death in a gunfight in the Santa Monica College library, authorities said.

Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks told reporters the rampage began at a house in the coastal city before the gunman, dressed all in black, made his way to Santa Monica College.

Seabrooks said he killed two people in the house, which caught fire, two more people as he moved several blocks toward the campus, and then two more on campus.

He entered the library and fired on other people but didn’t hit them, Seabrooks said.

Several students in the library reported hearing gunfire, and one witness said he heard a woman scream.

“The officers came in and directly engaged the suspect and he was shot and killed on the scene,” Seabrooks said.

She identified the gunman as 25 to 30 years old and dressed all in black, wearing what appeared to be a ballistic jacket.

The campus was searched for a second shooter, and a man dressed entirely in black, with the words “Life is a Gamble” on the back of his sweatshirt, was seen being taken into custody by law enforcement officers. He did not appear to be wounded.

“We are not convinced 100 percent that the suspect who was killed operated in a solo or alone capacity,” Seabrooks said.

DALLAS — A pregnant Texas actress who told FBI agents her husband had sent ricin-tainted letters to President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been arrested for orchestrating the scheme herself, law enforcement officials said Friday.

It was not immediately clear what charges would be filed against Shannon Guess Richardson of New Boston, Texas, a mother of five who has played bit roles in television shows. Two U.S. law enforcement officials confirmed her arrest to The Associated Press but spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly during the ongoing investigation.

FBI agents wearing hazardous material suits were seen going in and out of her house Wednesday in New Boston, about 150 miles northeast of Dallas near the Oklahoma and Arkansas borders. Officials have said the search was initiated after Richardson contacted the FBI and implicated her husband, Nathaniel Richardson.

Richard Ramirez, a mass murderer and serial rapist known as the "Night Stalker" for his 1984-85 crime spree in California, died Friday morning of natural causes at age 53, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said.

The California death row inmate died at Marin General Hospital north of San Francisco, the department said.

Ramirez was convicted in 1989 of 13 murders -- 11 in Southern California and two others in the San Francisco area -- along with five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults and 14 burglaries.

Ramirez, a professed "satanist," was dubbed the "Night Stalker" for his preference of breaking into houses in the wee hours of the morning.

His attacks, many of them on elderly couples, terrified Southern California. His preferred method of attack was to quickly kill the male and rape -- sometimes repeatedly -- the female after ransacking the home for valuables. Some of his victims survived and provided descriptions, but police were unable to name a suspect.

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With the purpose of writing about true crime in an authoritative, fact-based manner, veteran journalists J. J. Maloney and J. Patrick O’Connor launched Crime Magazine in November of 1998.

Their goal was to cover all aspects of true crime: from organized crime to serial killers, from capital punishment to prisons, from historical crimes to celebrity crime, from assassinations to government corruption, from justice issues to innocent cases, from crime films to books about crime. Read More